For music fans, it's an age-old debate: What would be your dream band lineup? What if this guy was on guitar and that guy was on vocals? What if this bass player and that drummer got to play together?
Metal Allegiance, the heavy music world's equivalent of a sports all-star team, has taken the discussion from smoky bars and internet message boards onto the stage and into the recording studio. Born as a loose, rotating cast of characters getting together to play some of their favorite cover songs, Metal Allegiance on Friday, Sept. 18 will unleash its debut album of original material, a self-titled affair on Nuclear Blast Entertainment.
Brought together by principal partner Mark Menghi, who plays additional bass on the album, the core lineup of Metal Allegiance is Megadeth bassist David Ellefson, Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick and drummer Mike Portnoy, known for myriad projects, like his membership in The Winery Dogs and his lengthy run in his former group Dream Theater.
Joining the core trio on the album is a who's who of heavy metal A-listers: Troy Sanders of Mastodon, Randy Blythe of Lamb Of God, former Pantera members Phil Anselmo and Rex Brown, Gary Holt of Slayer and Exodus, Steve "Zetro" Souza of Exodus, Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed, Charlie Benante of Anthrax, Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil, Alissa White-Gluz of Arch Enemy, Chuck Billy of Testament, Matt Heafy of Trivium, former Guns N' Roses guitarist Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, Ben Weinman of Dillinger Escape Plan, Andreas Kisser of Sepultura, wrestling superstar and Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho, Phil Demmel of Machine Head, dUg Pinnick of King's X, former Judas Priest singer Tim "Ripper" Owens, Mark Osegueda of Death Angel and Misha Mansoor of Periphery.
With the Metal Allegiance debut album about to drop and an album-release show scheduled for tonight (Thursday, Sept. 17) at Best Buy Theater in New York, Headlines & Global News recently chatted with Skolnick about assembling the star-studded album, working with a slew of guests spanning the generations of the genre and the current state of heavy metal.
How did you go about putting together the Metal Allegiance album? There obviously was a lot of moving parts to contend with.
We started out not thinking about it too much. I think it worked in a lot of ways because we were just very open to anything. We got together to write music, originally I think we were hoping to come up with a few good tunes, and as soon as we started writing, from the first moment it really happened naturally, it just exploded. We had so much music. I think at a certain point we just said screw it, we're not putting any covers on this, this can be an original project. So I think maybe because it started as a small unit, just like any other band, it was really like a power trio, except Menghi was there kind of guiding us along, getting excited when a riff sounded good, giving his opinion when he didn't like something, and I think just as the songs developed we started hearing different options for vocalists.
It helped us in a way to not have the limitations of working with just one singer, like most bands do. Instead we came up with songs, and we'd usually come up with a few names for singers, because we didn't talk to anybody yet, nobody knew what we were doing. The songs existed on their own and we all contributed lyric parts, I got involved with vocal melodies, just as guides, never thinking the singers had to follow them strictly - some of them did, actually, Matt from Trivium really liked what I sent him - and then there were other instances, like Phil Anselmo, he was just ready to take a crack at it without anything and just see what he came up with.
The type of people you have on here really span the generations, from Testament and Death Angel and Pantera to newer-school folks like Lamb of God, Mastodon, Lacuna Coil and Trivium. Was there an effort to bridge the generations of the metal community with this project?
Probably more of an implicit effort. I don't think that was ever said out loud, but I think we knew that going in that we should have multiple eras of these bands. They had to fit a certain criteria. I'm not going say any names particularly, but occasionally a name would come up and we'd say, "Oh yeah, that's a great singer, such a nice guy, but we can't get behind the band." The band's too commercial or whatever. But I think all of these musicians and the bands they're associated with, none of them sound derivative, but they're all relatable. Mastodon, for example, sounds like Mastodon, but they're definitely part of a lineage of music. The same with Lamb Of God, Trivium, pretty much all these bands, even though some of the bands don't sound anything alike. I think as the process developed it made sense that we wanted to cover the gamut.
As you were working with some of the younger players, did you get a sense of the influence your generation had on them?
It's something you don't think about much. When Testament goes to Europe and plays one of these big festivals, I just think oh, look who all is on the bill. It just feels like we're all peers and I don't really think about who's influenced by who. But it's always great to meet a band that you like and get to know them, and it turns out they were big fans. Some of the biggest bands right now may have seen Testament open for Slayer back in the day or something. It's nice to be reminded of.
Is it also good to see that there are people to pass the metal torch to and it's not in danger of dying off?
Well yeah, that was a thing too. At one point, especially in the '90s, there was such a backlash. Metal was just made so passé, uncool, by certain segments of the culture. So it's really nice to see not only that era pass, but also I think there's more appreciation than ever, especially outside of the U.S. I think that was more of a U.S. thing than anything else, and I think in many ways when it came to the hard music world, the infrastructure was crumbling, much like the highways (laughs), and meanwhile in Europe they're creating these amazing festivals with so many groups and supporting the arts.
On the Metal Allegiance website, you call your playing on the album a career milestone. Why?
Well, as much as I value being part of a two-guitar team in Testament, and I can't imagine it any other way and I wouldn't change it, it is a band that I joined later, so with Metal Allegiance I'm the guy that you hear on the whole record, the core foundation. In Testament my role is more like the lead guitarist, very similar to Kirk [Hammett] in Metallica or Chris[Poland] or Marty [Friedman] in Megadeth, the tone on those records, like on the Metallica records, that's James Hetfield's tone, on the Megadeth records that's Dave Mustaine's tone and then the lead guy comes in for a solo, and that's fine because that's how those projects work, but it was kind of nice for me to have an album where I can say "that's my tone" (laughs) or "these are riffs that I've come up with and they're being played the way I hear them directly," not showing it to someone else and then they're playing it. Not that it's not great in its own way, but I never had a project like this that's metal. I have my own acoustic album called "Planetary Coalition" where I play all the guitar parts and I have several jazz trio albums and there you're hearing me all over the record, but this is the first heavy project where I'm not just doing the solos or doing rhythm guitar that's blended in and underneath another person's rhythm guitar.
Most fans probably don't know that Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante is also a guitarist, but they'll get to hear him play guitar on this album. Was it a nice bonus to be able to include that?
I think it was twofold. Just purely from a logistics standpoint, anybody who's recorded drums before can tell you it's very hard to get a consistent drum sound in the studio with more than one drum set. So for consistency of the record it made sense for Mike to play all the drums, but we definitely wanted Charlie involved; he was a part of the project when it was an all-star cover group even before I was, so getting him in on the guitar made a lot of sense, and he's also perfect for the parts. We have a couple songs that are these guitar extravaganzas and some of the songs, like the song with Phil Anselmo, that's just a core rock band, but there's others like "Pledge Of Allegiance," which closes the album where it's a big group of guys, or the instrumental "Triangulum," and there it's just great to have Charlie come in and do his thing and his parts worked really well for the pieces.
While this is an original project, you close the deluxe edition of the album with a version of Dio's "We Rock." Since Ronnie James Dio's passing in 2010, the metal community has been unanimous in paying tribute to him. What is the significance of including this song, and what does he mean to heavy metal?
I think he's somebody that we all have in common. If you can't appreciate Ronnie James Dio you really have no business playing metal (laughs). He's very representative in a lot of ways. He became the singer for the quintessential and pioneering metal band, Black Sabbath. He started his own project and became, as far as I can think of the only solo metal singer besides Ozzy to become an arena act. He sang with such a power right up until the end. I was fortunate to tour with him when Testament did a tour with Motorhead and Heaven & Hell, and unlike some singers...you go back to Led Zeppelin in the '70s, as great as Robert Plant is, he's not hitting some of those notes off those Led Zeppelin records, but Ronnie always sounded like Ronnie. His vocals were never compromised. So I think he brought that to the table and he had a sense of humor. You can see examples of that in the Jack Black film "Pick Of Destiny" with Tenacious D. And he was the nicest guy. Anybody that ever met him knows he remembered everybody's name. If you think of "metal god," that's Rob Halford's title, but Ronnie was a metal god but he was also a down-to-earth guy. So it was very logical to celebrate Dio with the one cover track as a bonus for the album.
Are there plans for a Metal Allegiance tour?
We'd never be able to tour with everyone (laughs), but that's just the nature of the project. That doesn't mean we can't do the songs and do a great show but a scaled-down one with people doubling up on songs. We have an album-release show Sept. 17 at the Best Buy Theater. There are several other shows in the works in different locations. And we plan to do more. In fact there was just a musical camp in upstate New York hosted by The Winery Dogs, and they had myself and Dave Ellefson among the guest instructors, and Ellefson, Portnoy and I did a very scaled-down version of Metal Allegiance and we actually played one of the original songs "Can't Kill The Devil" with no singer. We just tossed the audience the chorus and they sang along, and it was great! So we know it can work in different configurations and for actual concerts in the future we'll figure out a way to bring it to the people.
